


Silver

by lizzieraindrops



Category: Orphan Black (TV)
Genre: Introspection, Other, silver - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-09
Updated: 2015-04-09
Packaged: 2018-03-22 00:09:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 311
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3708141
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lizzieraindrops/pseuds/lizzieraindrops
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A Rachel Duncan ficlet. Also posted <a href="http://lizzieraindrops.tumblr.com/post/115902495634/silver">on tumblr</a>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Silver

Silver is refinement. Far more subtle than gold, it is all the more powerful for it. (Almost, almost as precious.) Gold is garish, flaunted, vulgar. Disgraceful.

It will never be as strong as iron, she can accept this, but nor is it as brittle; it will not break. Silver is endlessly malleable and ductile. With skilled hands it may be drawn, bent, and beaten, into any shape desired. A chain, a chalice, a net, a cage. Those hands will be hers, and hers alone. This is what she wants.

With polishing, it will shine like surgical steel, but softer, richer, ever more precious. Never so coarse, so industrial, guileless, glaring. There is a reason it is reserved for finery and mirrors, instead of needles and gauges.

It bears no comparison to strings of pearls. They are merely the base excretions of spineless creatures, in the end.

Her father knew this, gave her the raw element to work with. Her mother knew this, gave her the polish to shine it. Her mentor knew this, showed her the ways tools can shape it.

She knows this, and now, the workshop is hers.

She draws it into a thousand wires and weaves a net to rival that of Hephaestus. She pours it molten into a mold to make a sculpture that fools the sharpest. She casts it into shining bullets that will kill all her wolves.

But the foil she beats herself into is wearing thin, wearing thinner. It cannot withstand the simultaneous onslaught of lead, of carbon, of belladonna tea, and she’s falling like mercury in a cold, lonely world.

When she comes to under the glint of harsh light off medical chrome, she knows that she has been tarnished, and that no polish can remove it.

When she finally looks into the mirror once again, she remembers that tarnish develops over years.


End file.
